A casteist and bigoted opinion piece in The Wire

We live in a society where hatred has taken over facts, especially in the media. Tuning into a news channel at nine would either mean bleeding ears or shamelessly biased anchors peddling their ideology masquerading as “honest opinion”. The poor quality reporting of print media forced me to stop buying a newspaper five years ago. I now borrow newspapers from friends, only to clean window panes and mirrors. Switching to online news at least lets one read the news for free. One can also customise what one wants to read. Life becomes a bit simpler. In the last few years we saw another form of “journalism” taking roots. The kinds which is present only online. This makes sense, since the future of news now lies in a smartphone and not in an LED TV.

Our wires are in bit of a tangle

The three names which comes to my mind are Scroll, The Wire and The Print. All three claim to be unbiased, but even a high school kid can tell which way they lean. Every story they put up can be summarised in one line, “I hate Modi and BJP”. There is nothing wrong in hating Modi or BJP. It is impossible that every citizen of India would love them. But the point here is that these are not just random Indian citizens. These are “reputed” media houses, run by “respectable” senior journalists and they have a responsibility, that of honest journalism. What happens when these platforms start dishing out Fake News? The Scroll fake stories can be read here and here. The Print fake story can be read here. And we all remember the Fake story run by The Wire on Amit Shah’s son, which was later pulled down by the website. Even mainstream media published Fake News, the case of The Hindu can be read here.  

The three online publications mentioned above, use not just real life incidents to write their fake stories but also use convoluted social issues to establish a narrative that is hatred in the least and a mechanism to paint an entire community in negative colour at best. Take this story by Nilanjana Bhowmick on The Wire. The headline reads, “Militant Hinduism and the Reincarnation of Hanuman”. The headlines are usually not written by the contributor. They are written by others to make them provocative and or interesting, primarily to click bait readers. In the story Ms Bhowmick narrates her “ordeal” in Noida. She of course gives us an alleged conversation with her driver. The driver seems to be the favourite pick for journalists to concoct stories.

@ProfVarshney extent of political marginalisation especially. An auto driver there told me "growth is real but for others not for me"

— barkha dutt (@BDUTT) December 15, 2012

Ironically have Rajasthan rajput driver in Gujarat. Says padmavati will be 'mast" film and Karni sena is bakwaas. The lessons of travel.

— Saba Naqvi (@_sabanaqvi) December 2, 2017

She starts with the description of what she believe to be a militant Hindu event, the Hanuman Jayanti procession in Noida. Her scary description is supported by a “seven second” long video where a random guy with a sword is leaning out of the window, amidst traffic. She probably has never witnessed a Sikh procession where people with saffron turbans march with swords and Kripans. The way Ms. Bhowmick reacted is how people react when they have been brought up in a protected environment, away from reality. But Hanuman Jayanti and the militancy of that single blade of sword was a mere tool, to grind her axe. She immediately jumps on to the RSS and gets disturbed by their weekend march in Khaki gear. She claims, “These visuals are a disturbing assertion of a resurrection of the RSS and the Bajrang Dal, and an indicator of how in the last few years militant Hinduism has grown roots in India.” One wonders, how walking on streets symbolises militant Hinduism. Please tell me if you get to understand this analogy.

Ms. Bhowmick is infact alarmed by the fact that RSS has members in some “up scale” sectors of Noida. She is worried about the “proliferation of Hindu extremism” in the apartment blocks of Noida. According to her people of Noida should behave the way Ms. Bhowmick prefers them to behave. She is after all the neo Brahmin, who wants to control everyone else. She is also outraged by the sudden increase in wealth of the local Gurjar community. She says, “Locally known as Gujjar boys, they sit on the pile of money their parents made from land acquisition. Their days are spent body building in gymnasiums or akharas.” Is Ms. Bhowmik trying to say that the local Gurjar community is nothing but a bunch of Hindu extremists? Is she painting an entire caste as militants? Or is she simply suffering from the Savarna superiority complex, which makes her uncomfortable when the peasants get rich?

Her absolute hatred to the Gurjar community becomes clear when she writes, “They have the most expensive smartphones, designer clothes, swanky cars, and more money than they know what to do with. What they do not have is proper education.” As if her piece full of hatred, bigotry and casteist slurs was not enough, she ends it with,” Noida is the new India. And the enormous success of Hindutva groups here is a warning that we will do well to pay heed to. And soon.” An alarming warning to instil fear in the readers’ minds.

It is OK to hate the RSS and the Bajrang Dal, it is Ms. Bhowmick’s right. But what is dangerous is to concoct stories using a mythical conversation with an imaginary driver to instil fear. To malign an entire community only because they now have money. To call an entire religion militant or extremist, without giving a single piece of statistic. Ms. Bhowmick and The Wire could have saved bandwidth by simply writing, “I hate RSS and Gurjars”. We live in a society where hatred has taken over facts, especially in the media.

Scroll and its lies

So it happens again. Scroll, is a so called “liberal” online publication which usually dishes out stories on social issues. These stories sometimes have a liberal sprinkling of lies on them. You can read more on the lies here. So in its latest attempt, Scroll has “revived” one of its old articles written by Girish Shahane. Now Girish sits in the same row as Shoaib Daniyal (also writes for Scroll), another habitual liar. Both Girish and Shoaib have an unexplained hatred for Indian history. That is probably the reason they never bother to really dig deeper to understand what the recent developments in archaeology suggest about India’s history. Maybe they both had to suffer a boring history teacher in school and hence are so disgusted with the subject that they decided to singlehandedly distort it.

In the latest “revived” article, Girish tries hard to “expose” the historical myths of India. A very challenging task, especially if one has to distort and hide facts. Let us examine the exposes one at a time. By the way, the article starts with invocation of BJP for some strange reason. But let it be.

Expose 1. The myth of rani Padmini

Here Girish makes the effort to establish the fact that Padmini is a fictitious character, who appears in the epic written by Jayasi, almost two centuries later. The records suggest that Padmini was also mentioned as Padmavati, thus introducing the element of myth to the story. Padmini may well have been a name given to the queen by Jayasi and later poets. But does that take away the fact that women of Chittor committed Jauhar once the city fell to Khilji? Jauhar has been recorded many times in Medieval India. Mostly in the then Rajputana but also in other parts of India. The South East Asia equivalent of Jauhar (Puputan) was recorded as late as the early twentieth century. The king with his entire family and the city dwellers would commit mass suicide by stabbing themselves with a Kris (dagger), when faced with imminent defeat. So yes the name Padmini may be fictitious but the other details stand true. The then prevailing war rules of the Muslim armies would allow the sack and plunder of the city for three days after its fall. The soldiers were allowed to take booty and slaves, a fifth of which would belong to the sultan. The women preferred to die instead of being humiliated in the slave markets.

Girish here goes one step further and appoints Khilji as “one of the finest generals in India’s military history”. What is not clear here is whether Girish considers burning of libraries and Buddhist places of worship as a qualification to be the “finest general”.

Expose 2. The myth of Prithviraj Chauhan

Here Girish contests the poem written by Chand Bardai, where Prithviraj is depicted as blind man, captured by Mohammed Ghori. Prithviraj, with the help of a companion kills Ghori by an arrow. Here again, Girish relies on a poem, which by no account should be considered history. But probably Girish learnt Greek history from Iliad and Odyssey and actually believes that there was indeed a Cyclops settlement in ancient Greece.

In both expose 1 & 2 Girish relies on poetry. He forgets that what people believe to be the words of god, were written down by humans. The new testament, the koran, the hadith were all written down, as we know them, centuries after Jesus and Mohammed died. These in no way these should be considered history and then rebutted. It is a fool’s job, really.

Expose 3. The myth of a non-violent India

Here Girish rebuts the “myth” of a non-violent India and quotes Vivekanand’s speech in Colombo. “…our religion is truer than any other religion, because it never conquered, because it never shed blood.” He then goes on to highlight the Chola naval expeditions to Sri Lanka and South East Asia. Hence proving that India was not a non-violent country. As it happens, a quote is taken out form a speech and is “adjusted” to suit the writer’s narrative. You can read the full text of the 1897 speech Vivekanand delivered here. Here the context in which the remark of India being a non-conquering nation was made was that of propagating ideas and probably religious beliefs through war. And in this context he says that India has never propagated her ideas through war. He was probably referring to the Crusades or the Islamic conquest of the Middle East and North Africa. Later in the speech Vivekanand mentions the Greeks and Romans who waged great wars but were ultimately erased and sent to the pages of history while India as a civilisation still stands.

Expose 4. The myth of Sanskrit

Girish firmly believes that Sanskrit is not the “mother of all languages”. He mentions the research which puts Proto Indo European (PIE) as the source of Indo European languages. According to the research the PIE originated in the Anatolian region and by that logic Sanskrit cannot be the mother of all languages, since Sanskrit itself is derived from an ancient language.

Girish in his claim does not tell us which research he is actually talking about. A quick Google search revealed that a research with the same conclusion was published in the Science in 2012. The new item in Times of India suggests that the research took into consideration 6,000 cognates, fed them into a computer programme and came up with the conclusion. Now it is interesting that the study claims to have come up some “convincing” evidence based on mere 6,000 cognates. But that is not all. Academicians and archaeologists have disputed the claims of the research. You can read the views here.

So is Sanskrit the mother of all languages? Yes and no. It may not be the mother of Arabic or Chinese but it surely is the mother of almost all Indian languages, except for maybe Tamil. The influence of Sanskrit is evident is the grammar and alphabets of the Indian languages and that of Tibet, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia and Laos. All these languages use the principles of Pannini of arranging the alphabet and have the same sound as those of Sanskrit. So yes, Sanskrit is the mother of all languages if you look South East.

Expose 5. The myth of a 5,000 year old civilisation

I am Bhirrana, I am 8,000 years old
Image: ASI

This is probably the lamest of the five rebuttals that Girish has concocted. He says, “In truth, almost nothing in India is 5,000 years old. The ruins of the Harappan civilisation come closest, but the artefacts that have survived, aside from a few pot shards, don’t date earlier than 2500 BC”. If the claim made by Girish is to be believed the Archaeological Survey of India is definitely an organisation that is spinning lies. Because the ASI has submitted a report suggesting the archaeological remains excavated at Bhirrana village date back to between 7570 – 6200 BCE. The entire history of the Indus-Saraswati civilisation has been pushed back by almost 3,700 years. So yes, the Indian civilisation is not 5,000 years old but more like 8,000 years old.

It is sad that for the sake of ideological leanings people not only distort data but also manufacture lies.